They promised to be careful and set forth in the opposite direction from the rest of the party whom they left putting together the remnants of the feast and packing away the plates.

It was an interesting walk.  They played Indian all the way.  Ethel Blue’s imagination had been greatly stimulated by the tale of the attack on Deerfield and she pretended to see an Indian behind every tree.  Ethel Brown pretended to shoot them all with unerring arrow, and Dicky charged the bushes in handsome style and routed the enemy with awful slaughter.

“This is just the kind of game we ought not to play if we want to make Dicky think of peace and not of war,” declared Ethel Blue at last when she had become breathless from the excitement of their countless adventures.

“That’s so.  It’s funny how you forget.  It’s just as Delia says—­we don’t realize how fighting and soldiers and thinking about military things is put into our minds even in games when we’re little.”

“I’m really sorry we’ve done this,” confessed.  Ethel Brown as they fell behind their charge.  “Dicky’s ‘pretending’ works over time anyway, and he may dream about Indians, or get scared to go to bed, and it will be our fault.”

“It’s rather late to think about it—­but let’s try not to do it again.  Isn’t there something we can call his attention to now to take his mind off Indians?”

Dicky was marching ahead of them drawing an imaginary bow and bringing down a large bag of imaginary birds, while from the difficulty with which he occasionally dragged an imaginary something behind him it seemed that he had at least slain an imaginary deer.

Naturally, with his hunting blood up, the Ethels found him not responsive to appeals to “see what a pretty flower this is” or to examine the hole of a chipmunk.  He was after more thrilling adventures.  Still, by the time they reached the railroad track, everyday matters were beginning to command his attention.  This short cut across the track was one that he had seldom been allowed to take, and the mere fact of doing it was exciting.  He stopped in the middle and looked up and down the line while the girls tugged at him.  It was only when he saw a bit or two of shining metal which, according to his arrow head game of the afternoon, he picked up and tucked away in the pocket of his rompers, that his attention was once more turned to the gathering of the wonders that seemed to be under his feet all the time if only he looked for them hard enough.

The errand to the stationery shop was successful.  The stationer said that most pencils now were made with erasers built into them, but that he thought he had a box of old tips left over.  He hunted for them very obligingly, and set so small a price on them that the Ethels took the whole box so that they might have a liberal supply in case any were lost off the arrow heads.  Dicky put one in his pocket so that he could place it on his arrow as soon as he got it into his hands once more, and he begged the Ethels to go home by way of Rose House so that he could fix it up that very night.